By the same mode of computation, we shall find 15,875 inhabitants, or 2,741 voters of the other cantons, who pay one sixth LESS to the contribution of the whole commune, will have three voices MORE than the 12,700 inhabitants, or 2,193 voters of the one canton.

Such is the fantastical and unjust inequality between mass and mass, in this curious repartition of the rights of representation arising out of territory and contribution.  The qualifications which these confer are in truth negative qualifications, that give a right in an inverse proportion to the possession of them.

In this whole contrivance of the three bases, consider it in any light you please, I do not see a variety of objects reconciled in one consistent whole, but several contradictory principles reluctantly and irreconcilably brought and held together by your philosophers, like wild beasts shut up in a cage, to claw and bite each other to their mutual destruction.

I am afraid I have gone too far into their way of considering the formation of a Constitution.  They have much, but bad, metaphysics,—­much, but bad, geometry,—­much, but false, proportionate arithmetic; but if it were all as exact as metaphysics, geometry, and arithmetic ought to be, and if their schemes were perfectly consistent in all their parts, it would make only a more fair and sightly vision.  It is remarkable, that, in a great arrangement of mankind, not one reference whatsoever is to be found to anything moral or anything politic,—­nothing that relates to the concerns, the actions, the passions, the interests of men. Hominem non sapiunt.

You see I only consider this Constitution as electoral, and leading by steps to the National Assembly.  I do not enter into the internal government of the departments, and their genealogy through the communes and cantons.  These local governments are, in the original plan, to be as nearly as possible composed in the same manner and on the same principles with the elective assemblies.  They are each of them bodies perfectly compact and rounded in themselves.

You cannot but perceive in this scheme, that it has a direct and immediate tendency to sever France into a variety of republics, and to render them totally independent of each other, without any direct constitutional means of coherence, connection, or subordination, except what may be derived from their acquiescence in the determinations of the general congress of the ambassadors from each independent republic.  Such in reality is the National Assembly; and such governments, I admit, do exist in the world, though, in forms infinitely more suitable to the local and habitual circumstances of their people.  But such associations, rather than bodies politic, have generally been the effect of necessity, not choice; and I believe the present French power is the very first body of citizens who, having obtained full authority to do with their country what they pleased, have chosen to dissever it in this barbarous manner.